Most Radical Gesture

"The Most Radical Gesture" is the first major study of the Situationist International, a revolutionary movement with great ambition and influence whose reflections on art, everyday life, pleasure, spontaneity, the city, and the spectacle have ensured it a vital, but largely hidden, role in the development of 20th-century culture and politics. Revealing the extent to which situationist ideas and tactics have influenced subsequent political theory and cultural agitation, this book discusses a variety of specific movements and moments of contestation, including Dada, surrealism, the events of May 1968, the Italian Autonomists, the Angry Brigade, and punk. It places the situationists in a line of impassioned anti-authoritarian dissent which also informs the work of writers like Lyotard and Deleuze and underwrites contemporary debates on postmodernism. It suggests that Baudrillard's reflections on hyperreality are impoverished reworkings of the situationists' critical analysis of capitalist society as a spectacle, and challenges postmodern denials of meaning, reality, and history by showing that postmodernism itself depends on a tradition which completely undermines the purpos;This book

`Plant's book is a timely and important interrogation of the relationshiop between situationism and postmodernism, ...' - Modern & Contemporary France`An analysis of Situationism is long overdue, and Sadie Plant's rigorous account finally gives it credit for its enormous contribution to postwar theory and revolutionary politics.' - New Statesman and Society`This is the first accessible study of the situationists, one of the 20th century's more arcane and avante-garde political groups.' - Sunday Times

Sadie Plant